Shoah is a 1985 Franco-British documentary film, directed by Claude Lanzmann, about the Holocaust (called the "Shoah" in Hebrew and French). The film primarily consists of his interviews and visits to German Holocaust sites across Poland, including three extermination camps. It presents testimonies by selected survivors, witnesses, and German perpetrators, often secretly recorded using hidden cameras.[3]

As Lanzmann does not speak Polish, Hebrew, or Yiddish, he depended on interpreters to work with most of his interviewees. This process enlarged the scale of the documentary, which is nine hours and 23 minutes long.[3] Lanzmann has also released four feature-length films based on unused material shot for Shoah.

While Shoah received critical acclaim and won notable awards, the film also aroused controversy and criticism, particularly in Poland, but also in the United States. A number of historians criticized it for failing to show and discuss the many Poles who rescued Jews, or to recognize the millions of Poles who were also killed by the Germans during the occupation of Poland.

Shoah was ranked number two on the "50 Greatest Documentaries of All Time" in a December 2015 poll by the British Film Institute.[4]

The sections on Treblinka include testimony from Abraham Bomba, who survived as a barber;[5]Richard Glazar, an inmate; and Franz Suchomel, an SS officer who worked at the camp, who reveals intricate details of the camp's gas chamber. Bomba breaks down while describing how a barber friend of his came across his wife and sister while cutting hair in an anteroom of the gas chamber. Suchomel states he did not know about extermination at Treblinka until he arrived there. This section includes Henryk Gawkowski, who said he drove one of the transport trains while intoxicated with vodka. Gawkowski's photograph appears on the poster used for the film's marketing campaign.

Testimonies on Auschwitz are provided by Rudolf Vrba, who escaped from the camp before the end of the war; and Filip Müller, who worked in an incinerator burning the bodies from the gassings. Müller recounts what prisoners said to him, and describes the experience of personally going into the gas chamber: bodies were piled up by the doors 'like stones'. He breaks down as he recalls the prisoners starting to sing while being forced into the gas chamber. Accounts include some from local villagers, who witnessed trains heading daily to the camp and returning empty; they quickly guessed the fate of those on board.

Lanzmann also interviews bystanders. He asks whether they knew what was going on in the death camps. Their answers reveal that they did but they justified their inaction by the fear of death. Two survivors of Chełmno are interviewed: Simon Srebnik, who was forced to sing military songs to entertain the Nazis; and Mordechaï Podchlebnik. Lanzmann also has a secretly filmed interview with Franz Schalling, a German security guard, who describes the workings of Chełmno. Walter Stier, a former Nazi bureaucrat, describes the workings of the railways. Stier insists he was too busy managing railroad traffic to notice his trains were transporting Jews to their deaths.

The Warsaw ghetto is described by Jan Karski, who worked for the Polish government-in-exile and Franz Grassler, a Nazi administrator who liaised with Jewish leaders. A Christian, Karski sneaked into the Warsaw ghetto and escaped to England to try to convince the Allied governments to intervene more strongly on behalf of the Jews, but failed to do so. Memories from Jewish survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising conclude the documentary.

Lanzmann also interviews Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, who discusses the historical significance of Nazi propaganda against the European Jews, and the Nazi development of the Final Solution. The complete text of the film was published in 1985.

During his trip to Poland in July 1978, Lanzmann's crew filmed his conversations with an elderly Polish man named Henryk Gawkowski, who, 35 years earlier, had worked on the locomotives pulling Holocaust trains to Treblinka during World War II.[6] The photograph used for the film poster shows Gawkoski on a locomotive to Treblinka, but there was no reconstruction of events from his youth; the type of locomotives used in 1943 were different, as was the landscape. The female translator insists on calling him the train's operator (or conductor in Polish); nevertheless, Gawkowski stated that he only shoveled coal into the engine's firebox, and that two German officers were always on every train. What happened to the victims, Gawkowski said, was not his fault, adding emphatically that if he had the opportunity, he would have been the first to slash Hitler's throat.[6]

Lanzmann was commissioned by Israeli officials to make what they thought would be a two-hour film, delivered in 18 months, about the Holocaust from "the viewpoint of the Jews".[7][8] As time went on, Israeli officials withdrew as his original backers.[7] Over 350 hours of raw footage were recorded, including the verbatim questions, answers, and interpreters' translations. Shoah took eleven years to make.[9] It was plagued by financial problems, difficulties tracking down interviewees, and threats to Lanzmann's life. The film was unusual in that it did not include any historical footage, relying instead on interviewing witnesses and visiting the crime scenes.[10] Four feature-length films have since been released from the outtakes.

Some German interviewees were reluctant to talk and refused to be filmed, so Lanzmann resorted to using a hidden camera. Some of the most controversial interviews were obtained in this way, conspicuous by their grainy, black and white appearance.[10] The interviewees in these scenes are sometimes obscured or distinguished by the sight of technicians watching the recording. During one interview, the covert recording was discovered, and Lanzmann was physically attacked. He was hospitalized for a month and charged by the authorities with "unauthorized use of the German airwaves".[8]

Lanzmann arranged many of the scenes, but not the testimony, before filming witnesses. For example, Bomba was interviewed while pretending to cut his friend's hair in a working barbershop; a steam locomotive was hired to recreate the journey the death train conductor had taken while transporting Jews; and the opening scene shows Srebnik singing in a rowboat, similarly to how he had "serenaded his captors".[8] Through these scenes the viewer is encouraged to think not only about the historical actions of these men but about the ethics of reflection, in encouraging them to re-live these experiences.

The first six years of production were devoted to the recording of interviews with the individuals who appear in the film; these were conducted in 14 different countries.[9] Lanzmann worked on the interviews for four years before first visiting Poland. After the shooting had been completed, editing for the film continued for five years, as it was cut from 350 hours of raw footage to the 91⁄2 hours of the final version.[9] Lanzmann frequently replaced the camera shot of the interviewee with modern footage from the site of the relevant death camp. The matching of testimony to places became a "crucial trope of the film".[8]

Shoah was made without subtitles or voice-overs. The questions and answers were kept on the soundtrack, along with the voices of the interpreters.[8] Transcripts of the interviews, in original languages and English translations, are held by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Videos of excerpts from the interviews are available for viewing online, and linked transcripts are available for reading and downloading from the museum's website.[11]

Hailed as a masterpiece by many critics, Shoah was described in the New York Times as "an epic film about the greatest evil of modern times."[10] In 1985, the year the documentary was released, Critic Roger Ebert described it as "an extraordinary film" and "one of the noblest films ever made.[12] It is not a documentary, not journalism, not propaganda, not political. It is an act of witness."[13] Ebert declined to rank Shoah, saying that it belonged in a class to itself and no film should be ranked against it. Gene Siskel named it as his choice for the best movie of the year, later naming it the second best film of the 1980s.[14]

Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes shows a 100% score, based on 32 reviews, with an average rating of 9.2/10. The site's consensus states: "Expansive in its beauty as well as its mind-numbing horror, Shoah is a towering -- and utterly singular -- achievement in cinema."[15]Metacritic reports a 99 out of 100 rating, based on 4 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[16] It is the site's 13th highest-rated film, including re-releases.[17]

Shoah was the subject of considerable controversy almost from the day of its theatrical release. Pauline Kael, the most influential American film critic of her day,[25] and whose parents were American Jewish immigrants from Poland,[25] described the film, in The New Yorker, as "logy and exhausting right from the start..."[3] "[S]itting in a theatre seat—wrote Kael—for a film as full of dead spaces as this one seem[ed] to [her] a form of self-punishment". "Lanzmann did all the questioning himself, while putting pressure on people in a discursive manner, which gave the film a deadening weight," she said.[3]

In spring 1985, Lanzmann told the French Libération that his documentary is an indictment of Poland's complicity in the Holocaust.[26] The Socio-Cultural Association of Jews in Poland (Towarzystwo Społeczno-Kulturalne Żydów w Polsce) called it a political provocation, and delivered a protest letter to the French embassy in Warsaw.[26] A columnist for The New Yorker wrote that the "Polish government asked France" to ban the film after its première in 1985.[8]

The film provoked strong criticism of Lanzmann's vision of "dark, drab, poor, and anti-Semitic Poland."[27] The official government-run newspapers and state television criticized it, as did the writers of the unofficial Second Circulation of the Polish anti-communist press. Almost no one defended the film. Most intellectuals referred to it as tendentious, and inherently anti-Polish.[27]Foreign MinisterWładysław Bartoszewski, an Auschwitz survivor and an honorary citizen of Israel, criticized Lanzmann for choosing to ignore the many thousands of Polish rescuers of Jews. He said the director instead focused his camera on impoverished rural Poles in rags, selected to conform with his preconceived notions. Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, an eminent Polish-Jewish writer and dissident, was puzzled by Lanzmann's deliberate omission of anybody in Poland with advanced knowledge of the Holocaust.[28]

In his book Dziennik pisany nocą, Herling-Grudziński wrote that the thematic construction of Shoah, allowed Lanzmann to exercise a reduction method so extreme that the plight of the non-Jewish Poles must remain a mystery to the viewer. Grudziński asked a rhetorical question in his book: "Did the Poles live in peace, quietly plowing farmers' fields with their backs turned on the long fuming chimneys of death-camp crematoria? Or, were they exterminated along with the Jews as subhuman?" According to Grudziński, Lanzmann leaves this question unanswered, but the historical evidence shows that Poles also suffered widespread massacres at the hands of the Nazis.[28]

Lanzmann's purpose in making the film is revealed by his comments that he "fears" Poland and that the death camps could not possibly have been constructed in France because the "French peasantry would not have tolerated them." He has admitted he intended to indict the Poles in Shoah and has made no films about the Holocaust in France where, presumably, anti-Jewish sentiments are not to be found. The observation of Eva Hoffman, a Polish Jew, that antisemitism was neither fundamental to Polish culture nor "exceptional" in its virulence is utterly lost on Lanzmann. Not surprisingly, many Poles bitterly condemned the film as tendentious and manipulative, including Jan Karski and Jerzy Turowicz.

Lanzmann has released four feature-length films based on unused material shot for Shoah. The first three are included as bonus features in the Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-ray release of the film. All four are included in the Masters of Cinema Blu-ray release of the film.